#weirdlit

[cyberpunkonline]

If you are lost.

Then listen.

[kekwcomics]

Hi, it's time for a new, long-overdue introduction!

I'm KEK-W, a UK-based writer of comics, films, TV and fiction.

In recent years I've written JUDGE DREDD, ROGUE TROOPER and TYRANNY REX for 2000AD, as well as the Historical Science Fantasy series THE ORDER, and the acclaimed DARK JUDGES: FALL OF DEADWORLD Dark Horror series featuring JUDGE DEATH. I've aldso written for AHOY Comics, Image Comics, Commando, Misty & Scream, Battle, Storyworlds, etc, etc in a variety of genres and style.

But I'm most proudest of the non-corporate prose books I've written. The most recent, published a couple days ago, is MEET THE SHRIVELWOODS, a humorous 40-ish page indy chapbook for those of you into Gothic Romance, The Addams Family, Dark Shadows and Vivian Standshall's Sir Henry at Rawlingson End.

Hope you enjoy.

MEET THE SHRIVELWOODS from kekw

MEET THE SHRIVELWOODS from kekw

[americaneldritch]

Arkham Community College: American Literature 101: The King in Yellow is a Fool 

In the first episode of Arkham Community College, professor Aladdin Collar explores the original design of the King in Yellow, as envisioned by illustrator and author Robert W. Chambers, and how the original design was Xeroxed into oblivion as it was reprinted. 

[darrenhopes]

A strange encounter with a fly begins a spiralling series of ever more distressing and hallucinatory experiences for an alcoholic father trying to come to terms with the loss of his wife many years earlier. As he tries to make sense of the time that has passed since her death and the strange and terrifying apparitions his world begins to unravel. Is it his drinking? Lack of sleep? Is this madness? Or something else?

Bzzzzzz

First of a series of illustrations to accompany a short I am writing.

His Window i

[christapagliei]

Call Your Saints

We thought they were crows as they swung low in the sky. Lula, Rose, Boy and I were coming home from an away game. Boy was driving. It was a long drive back, and the sun had set. The road had been bending next to the river for a while now. A mix of empty and active warehouses lined the waterfront. Like looming specters they hung in the January air; a few with windows winking with light. Trees were bare, if they were there at all.

The river banked, as rivers do. I had been staring out the window daydreaming- but movement caught my eye.

“Birds.” They were moving together in harmony. My mother says they vote sull'ala “on the wing” that’s how they know where to go next. And so the net of birds throbbed echoing each other's movements.

Then I looked again.

I’m a city boy but I’ve read a book, so I know that starlings are the ones who do this little psychic dance. They call it a murmur. Starlings are small birds, they look like black pools of oil spattered down carelessly. But these were not small birds. They were innumerable creatures of significant size- wingspans of five feet across dipping and darting I’m lazy formation over the cold, polluted river.

I looked behind us and in front of us. Why were we the only car on the road?  By this time even Boy had noticed the creatures as they seemed to sail above us. I made brief eye contact with my cousin, he feigned grit and I swallowed. Boy’s eyes darted back to the road just in time to swerve around a creature stopped and hulking on the asphalt. Our car’s tires smoked, and the thing heaved with heavy labored breaths in the road, as if we had stunned him. The girls yelled and they slammed their fists into the headrests to shake us from our shock. The creatures enourmous wings flapped and it rose, two legs like a man’s extended out of a dark cowl from which two red eyes gleamed. I grabbed the St. Christopher medal from behind the rearview mirror “Give us a hand here. We’re travelers. Or call St. Michael because I think this is the Devil.”

Boy shifted into gear and accelerated. “Well, either way hang on St. Christopher” I thought as the car pushed forward. The air was thick with with the dark creatures now, and they undulated in formation around us. They kept up with us too easily. The odometer climbed. The car did its best. It lurched and groaned. There was the sound of claw on metal issuing a high screech that echoed in your bones. I was sure that they’d be on us any minute, and my stomach soured, dropping against my spine. They were so near, reaching, their inky blackness and eyes like pools of rust and light. “When they reach us, maybe I can distract them enough that the others can get away...” But then, a minor Miracle, the old car lurched forward a little faster, and the spectres began to lag behind and slowly drop out of sight. Even after they had all been left far behind us and each beast had become a black dot and disappeared from view, Boy didn’t slow the car. The drive usually takes fourty minutes home but we made it in twenty and spent the night waiting for legions of black winged creatures to descend on the house or be reported on the news. But they never were. In fact we would have thought it was some kind of shared dream, if not for four long claw marks on the trunk of the car that we drove along the river that night.

[cyberpunkonline]

∴ THERE IS A WAY OUT ∴

There are three known exits from the Red Brick Road.

Three directions that resolve.

Three that return you somewhere—broken, changed, but still within the system.

The fourth does not behave.

WHAT DO YOU SEEK?

∴ THERE IS A WAY OUT ∴

⌘ the fourth path is already in use ⧖

[birdbrainoblivion]

Blindsight by Peter Watts

I have finished writing another review on Blindsight, by Peter Watts. I hope you all enjoy it. I was slightly withdrawn from sleep when writing this so it may be a bit nonsensical but nonetheless... In short, Blindsight is what happens when aliens decide to take a selfie with Earth, pings everybody in the universal groupchat, then proceeds to not respond to anyone asking for clarification on the existence of alien life. Excerpt from: Me (again)

Blindsight by Peter Watts is a hard science fiction novel about extraterrestrial first contact in the far future AND BEFORE YOU CLICK OFF THE PAGE SAYING YOU AREN'T INTERESTED,

hold on. 

Stick around, for a moment. 

Because I too, didn't really find appeal in humanity's first contact with extraterrestrials 

(even if it is SUPER COOL) (actually writing that out loud kind of shifted my views, first contact novels were always cool)

Lots - LOTS - of media don't do aliens well. I will admit, alien first-contact novels are not something I am overly well-versed in, so I don't have much to compare it to. Most first contact media are summarized with either a resounding "we made contact with aliens, they want to kill us", or "we want to make contact, the antagonist doesn't want us to, we made contact anyways and now we're all friends" and while that plot is typical of many different genres outside of science fiction, what usually happens is the actual extraterrestrial first contact sections of the first-contact media are supplanted by unnecessary romantic side-plots or leave the aliens as vague unmentioned beings who are never addressed along with Earth's implied societal reaction. 

Blindsight was a new experience for me. I had not read an abundance of hard sci-fi (hard sci-fi is defined as science fiction with a specific attention to detail directed towards making sure it is realistic and logical) or sci-fi in general, and even less of books about aliens (probably only one other I can name off my head). Holding this in mind I regardless found Blindsight to be personally enjoyable. More on my blog, because I don't want to put spoilers, it'd be a REALLY long post and I don't want to clutter up your feed, and I need analytics of people coming on my blog for a project. I hope you enjoy (know I said that, but wanted to say it again because why not)

[emptynowhere]

"I thought about the denigrated dialectics of nature. I thought about the falling rate of prophecy. The house continued its interrupted collapse." -China Mieville, The Dusty Hat in Three Moments of an Explosion